With the increased concern about the possibility of contracting blood borne diseases, such as AIDS and hepatitis, from accidental, self-inflicted, needle stick injuries with a possibly contaminated needle, the health care industry is presently concentrating on minimizing, or eliminating, the use of needles wherever possible. The FDA has urged health care workers to avoid re-capping of needles after using them for intravenous (IV) and intramuscular injections. One solution to avoiding re-capping needles after using them for IV injections is to use a needle-less IV injection port. The use of needle-less IV injection ports has become more widespread over the past few years. One complaint, however, when using a needle-less IV injection port is that one must still use a needle to fill the syringe, before it can be used with the needle-less IV injection port. A needle used to fill a syringe is usually not infectious, but the use of a needle here, does expose a health care worker to a potential needle stick, and does add the extra cost of a needle. One way to avoid this potential needle-stick, and fill a syringe without the use of a needle, is to use a medication vial (MV) adapter.
There are a few special devices presently described which do permit filling syringes without the use of needles (Froning et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,505,709, Smith et al., No. 4,650,475, and Schroeder, No. 5,035,689). There are some devices that have means for affixing themselves to a medication vial (Forman et al., No. 4,759,756, Gilbert et al., No. 4,969,883, and Holtz, No. 4,944,736). These devices and the methods used to attach them to a standard MV (Holtz, Froning et al., Smith et al., Forman et al., Schroeder) are somewhat cumbersome. Their design makes them hard to attach their respective device to the MV, and this difficulty in attaching them to the MV can easily lead to contamination of the device, with loss of sterility of the device, loss of sterility of the MV, and loss of sterility of the medication contained inside of the MV.
Other examples of related art in this field are shown in Smith, U.S. Pat. No. 4,230,112, Parsons, U.S. Pat. No. 4,913,699, and Curley et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,328,802.